I say: Photography is responsible for the rise of abstract artwork

What do you think. Painters hundreds of years ago painted more or less realistically. Only after the improvement of photography did more radically abstract painting rise up. Photography caused greater exploration and acceptance of abstract painting and drawing.

discuss.

Say, are you one century too late? That's the kind of questions that people were asking themselves already in early 1900s when abstract art came to prominence.

Also brings to mind Pictorialism, the turn of the century fad for photography to mimic painting.

I think you're absolutely right...photography, and rather rigid academic schools of painting did indeed promote abstraction as a reaction. But, if you look at the current scene, contemporary realism has become a very robust force in modern art work...and...it's selling extremely well!! I can only speculate that its currency is more highly valued as a reaction against the overwhelming glut of large color photographic (more often than not inkjet) work. Perhaps buyers feel that they'd prefer a bit less hyper-realism in favor of a more painterly piece, and own a really hand made work that communicates a similar sensibility. I suspect people are, understandably, not too impressed with what they perceive as button pushing digital facileness.

Then again, there is this new trend of realistic portraiture paintings that mimic the camera lens, with depth of field, blurring, perspective deformation, etc. Most really look like photographs from a good distance.
Painting (and sculpture) had their revolution way before photography came to be and it was against the stale ideas of academic naturalism and the liberation of the individual artistic technique, something that very, very few dared to do before modernism.
Oriental art and philosophy was more to blame for that change of ideas than the development of the photographic technology.

architects applied ornament to their structures in the near east,
masons carved ornate designs into sarcophagi in scandanavia,
artists covered drawings from the illuminated manuscripts in flowers and organic design.
persian rugs are covered with organic abstract forms.
masks from africa are covered with facets
screen paintings from the far east have shifting perspective and shifting depth of field.
the gods are often part beast and part human.
primary colors the 90º angle and equal sides of a square are pure.
the futurists saw the future.
antonio gaudi made things out of sand and the sea.
the light in southern france is beautiful.
it was common for over the counter medicines to contain opiates.
the rye was covered in mold ( ergot ).

there are many different influences to (abstract art), and the short list is .. a short list.

someone can use a camera, film, paper ( or that other stuff ) and make the wildest abstract art they can think of
and then they can look in an art history book, or museum of "ancient" art and find something just like it
that was done a long time ago.
i don't know if i would go as far as to say the photography is responsible for the rise of abstract art.
we just are more aware of abstract art, as abstract .... before it was just art.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
-- Ecclesiastes 1: 9

It may not have been the underlying cause for abstract art, but it may have given the final nudge.

gene

Michel Hardy-Vallée said:

Say, are you one century too late? That's the kind of questions that people were asking themselves already in early 1900s when abstract art came to prominence.

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Indeed, Picasso was interested in photography and expressed this view explicitly.

try a century and three quarters too late. Photography arrived immediately prior to the advent of impressionism (1839 for photography, 1860s for impressionism). Of course, Impressionism was as much a reaction against the rapid mechanization of the Industrial Revolution in general as it was against photography particularly, but photography can certainly be seen as one offshoot of the Industrial Revolution. It also emerged as a reaction to the mass social uphevals of the 1840s-1860s, both in the US and abroad. The American Civil War and the revolutions of 1848 provided the beginnings of reactions against the old order of things, including neoclassical painting that merely repeated what was by then trite, cliched genre painting.

Here's a link to an interesting article about how Picasso's used a box camera with a broken lens and hand-held prism to fragment photographs...

http://www.detroitmona.com/Jef_Bourgeau/picasso%27s_camera.htm

Malavich + Lazlo Moholy-Nagy = Bauhaus

Therefore: Abstract Art > Photography


Malavich

Dead Link Removed
Moholy-Nagy


Photography > Abstract Art? No, I'd say that WWI and Theosophy had more of an influence.

There are a lot of great arguments that can be made regarding the cross-influences between painting and photography, but to attribute causality is to oversimplify. The classic study is Aaron Scharf's Art and Photography. It's fascinating; if you haven't read it, I'd recommend doing so. It neither proves nor disproves the claim made in the original posting but adds a great deal of depth.

Realistic painting appeared just prior to the advent of photography and the two existed side by side. Comparison of certain trends in painting and photography show that there were common concerns and that the practitioners of both were well aware of the work done in the other field. Scharf's work presents some great examples.

One important and usually overlooked aspect of impressionism is that it was not just a fuzzy way of seeing suitable for toilet paper and funeral home ads, but essentially realism carried out to its furthest end, where vision and light are analyzed. Degas was an accomplished photographer, and used photography in his painting; this was verified by specific photographic artifacts found in his studio after his death. Other painters used photography in their work as well, and relied on it heavily, although they didn't advertise the fact of their doing so. This kind of use wasn't limited to the realists (and in this category the impressionists are included) but included neo-classicists (Ingres) and romantics; in fact, it preceded chemically produced photography by centuries in the widespread use of the camera obscura and camera lucida. Going the other way, photographers looked to painting for inspiration as well. This was not simply limited to the pictorialists. Alvin Langdon Coburn, for example, could be considered a cubist as well as a symbolist; he most likely sat in the café with Picasso and Braque.

And it's not over yet, and may never be over. These examples are a bit dated now, maybe 30 years old: Jerry Uelsmann's relationship with René Magritte, J Peter Witkin's knockoffs of Goya, Archimboldo, etc.

I find this really fascinating. Thanks to the OP.

I agree with the idea that photography didn't contribute too much to abstract art. What is a fact for me is that photography liberated western late XVII and early XVIII centuries romantic painting from it's "documentary" duty or obligation, and the use of different focal distance lenses gave to the world of art, and the rest of the world, a new way of seeing.

Did photography nudge painters into abstraction? Well, it was there of course, but no, it didn't. A visit to the Prado to see Goya's late "black paintings" puts paid to that idea. Many painters painted abstraction long before it had a name.

I don't know that you can call Goya's "black paintings" abstract - they may be surreal, gothic and nightmarish but they're not abstract. They're definite antecedents of impressionism. They're kinda what Caravaggio might have done had he been an impressionist. They're also cartoonish- Goya was after all a political cartoonist in his day, producing social commentary in the form of engravings. The "Black Paintings" are a reflection of that, but instead of lampooning figures in the Bourbon court or the Catholic church, they were lampooning his own inner demons, or perhaps his inner demons lampooning him.

Jose A Martinez said:

I agree with the idea that photography didn't contribute too much to abstract art. What is a fact for me is that photography liberated western late XVII and early XVIII centuries romantic painting from it's "documentary" duty or obligation, and the use of different focal distance lenses gave to the world of art, and the rest of the world, a new way of seeing.

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However, the experiments of Muybridge and Marey, most especially the latter, can be seen as the seminal influence for much in painting. cf. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, as well as work by the futurists. That famous little sculpture of of Brancusi's (can't remember the precise name, but check Dead Link Removed) deals with the idea of flight; you can see the same thing as traced by repeated exposures of a bird in flight in the work of Marey. The form could be considered the form that the bird traces through time and space as it flies.

Here is a site that deals with Marey's influence on Duchamps, specifically:

http://www.understandingduchamp.com/author/marey/index.html

I think it would be very hard to overstate these influences. It is important to remember, though, that art has ALWAYS been abstract in the sense that any art product is taken out of context. Even realism is abstract, as is every photograph ever made. Just try making a photograph of Los Angeles including the Eiffel Tower. Think of what an "abstract" of a scholarly paper means. The whole paper is not there.

Iwagoshi said:

Malavich + Lazlo Moholy-Nagy = Bauhaus

Therefore: Abstract Art > Photography

Malavich

Dead Link Removed
Moholy-Nagy


Photography > Abstract Art? No, I'd say that WWI and Theosophy had more of an influence.

Click to expand...

abstraction started, in modern-painting at least, years
before with the pointalists, and impressionists,
and fauvists, and probably way before that
with surrealist + abstract drawings and carvings
by so-called ancient / primitive cultures.
a lot of the 'ancients'
were way ahead than we are now.

manholy nagy WAS bauhaus, so how
could russian constructivists + bauhaus = bauhaus ?

but then again there is that song "i am my own grandpaw"

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7x1ETPkZsk[/YOUTUBE]

jnanian said:

manholy nagy WAS bauhaus, so how
could russian constructivists + bauhaus = bauhaus ?

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John,

I'm surprised, you should know this.

Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz to a family of mixed Jewish and Hungarian heritage. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his uncle, Nagy. Later, he added the pseudonym Moholy to his surname, after the town in which he grew up (today in Serbia, Mol). After studying law in Budapest and serving in World War I, Moholy-Nagy was in Vienna in 1919, where he first discovered constructivism in exhibitions of works of Malevich, Naum Gabo and El Lissitzky. From Wikipedia

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The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design.[1] The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography From Wikipedia

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Terry

Moholy-Nagy, like Klee and Kandinsky, taught at the Bauhaus. I don't think the Bauhaus was monolithic, although I believe that it is often presumed to be so. The individuals associated with it had varied aesthetic attitudes.

Iwagoshi said:

John,

I'm surprised, you should know this.

Terry

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hi terry

thanks for the wiki-stuff
i LOVE how so much "stuff" is at our fingertips ...

i know that a lot of those folks back then between ww1 and ww2 fed off of eachother ..
while i know walter gropius founded the bauhaus movement
there were lot of different people involved with it after innitial founding.
maholy nagy was deeply involved from 1923 on ...


also from mr. wiki

" In 1923, he replaced Johannes Itten as the instructor of the preliminary
course at the Bauhaus. This effectively marked the end of the school's
expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a
school of design and industrial integration. The Bauhaus became known for
the versatility of its artists, and Moholy-Nagy was no exception. Throughout
his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography,
typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design. One of
his main focuses was on photography. He coined the term "the New Vision"
for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the
outside world that the human eye could not. His theory of art and teaching
was summed up in the book The New Vision, from Material to Architecture.
He experimented with the photographic process of exposing light sensitive
paper with objects overlaid on top of it, called photogram. While at the
Bauhaus, Moholy's teaching in diverse media -- including painting, sculpture,
photography, photomontage and metal -- had a profound influence on a
number of his students, including Marianne Brandt.

He was editor of the art and photography department of the European
avant-garde magazine International Revue i 10 from 1927 to 1929.
Moholy-Nagy resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928 and worked in film and
stage design in Berlin, where he was required to submit his work to be
censored, and then in Paris and Holland before moving to London in 1935. In
England, Moholy-Nagy formed part of the circle of émigré artists and
intellectuals who based themselves in Hampstead. Moholy-Nagy lived for a
time in the Isokon building with Walter Gropius for eight months and then
settled in Golders Green. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy planned to establish an
English version of the Bauhaus but could not secure backing, and then
Moholy-Nagy was turned down for a teaching job at the Royal College of Art.
Moholy-Nagy made his way in London by taking on various design jobs
including Imperial Airways and a shop display for men's underwear. He
photographed contemporary architecture for the Architectural Review where
the assistant editor was John Betjeman who commissioned Moholy-Nagy to
make documentary photographs to illustrate his book An Oxford University
Chest. In 1936, he was commissioned by fellow Hungarian film producer
Alexander Korda to design special effects for Things to Come. Working at
Denham Studios, Moholy-Nagy created kinetic sculptures and abstract light
effects, but they were rejected by the film's director. At the invitation of
Leslie Martin, he gave a lecture to the architecture school of Hull University.


In 1937, at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, the Chairman of the Container
Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the
director of the New Bauhaus. The philosophy of the school was basically
unchanged from that of the original, and its headquarters was the Prairie
Avenue mansion that architect Richard Morris Hunt designed for department
store magnate Marshall Field. "

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http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2007/07/23/34596.html


if you ever are in boston/ cambridge ma, and want to see one of the coolest
things maholy nagy made, go to the fogg museum .. every wednesday at 1:45
they give a demonstration of his "light prop"
it might be good to call first, since their schedule might change from time to time



john

BetterSense
What do you think. Painters hundreds of years ago painted more or less realistically. Only after the improvement of photography did more radically abstract painting rise up. Photography caused greater exploration and acceptance of abstract painting and drawing.

Photography caused that abstract painting, as we see it today (say three crossed lines only), TOO, and it is one of the big reason. Painters want now to stay away from like photography realism, to make something new, for the sake of surviving. They (painters) found hard time to keep their market unaffected. There are many other reasons along as: investigating metal tubes for packing oil paint, than, in just recent time 95% of all pigments we have today are new investigated (after photography is born), some expensive pigments are produced as synthetic (say lapis lazuli)and so much less expensive, transportation and easy to reach any painting tool, mass production of many stuffs for painting. And also we have so many “painters” today as never seen in past, and just a few can draw (like photographers too). We today still have painters that do job in the “same” way as old masters did, and actually they have much better security and much better position in the society than that abstract painter. Some make a painting in one month and sell it for $15000-$30000.

You probably saw in some art galleries that abstract paints. Well it is what they have to expose. Bring to them that old master style good painting, and you see that the same moment all abstraction is gone from the wall like a magic (except if that abstract pain. comes from George Bush or like).

Daniel OB
www.Leica-R.com